Conservative Pundits Use White Nationalist Sam Francis To Explain Trump's Popularity

In the midst of Trump’s sustained popularity heading into the Iowa caucuses, the words of the late Sam Francis, an influential white nationalist, are being held up as vindicated by his peers.

On his January 20 broadcast, hard-right, conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh quoted a 1996 article penned by Francis for Chronicles titled “From Household to Nation” about Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaigns and position relative to mainstream conservatism.

Sooner or later, as the globalist elites seek to drag the country into conflicts and global commitments, preside over the economic pastoralization of the United States, manage the delegitimization of our own culture, and the dispossession of our people, and disregard or diminish our national interests and national sovereignty, a nationalist reaction is almost inevitable and will probably assume populist form when it arrives.

The passage, considered prescient by Limbaugh, followed an analysis by Michael Brendan Dougherty at The Week that argued that Francis had accurately described Donald Trump’s rise to popularity. White nationalists quickly held up Limbaugh and Dougherty’s statements as vindication.

A day later, the National Review took its stand against Trump, to the chagrin of mainstream conservatism and the celebration of the extremist right, which views the rebuke as the ultimate honor for Trump, a candidate who has shirked conventional tactics throughout his campaign.

Several days after Limbaugh’s broadcast, the National Review article appeared in full at Richard Spencer’s white nationalist thought catalog Radix Journal and the celebration of Francis’s foresight and Trump’s upending of the establishment began.

Hannibal Bateman, writing at Radix, declared that, “The dispossession of the Beltway Right is a moment that should be celebrated and seized. … The controlled grammatical tyranny they have exercised over the thought of the Right is nearing its end. Instead of writing their obituaries with a period, let’s do it with an exclamation mark!”

Brad Griffin, a leader in the League of the South and the force behind the white supremacist blog Occidental Dissent, wrote that same day, “Sam Francis was right: we need to stop pretending we are ‘true conservatives’ or that we have anything in common with these bow-tied, low-T clowns. We don’t support the ‘conservative agenda’ as articulated by the National Review. We are populists and nationalists, which means we are ‘tethered’ to the well-being of our own people and protecting and advancing their interests, not some abstract ideology.”

“Lord Tinsdale,” a prolific poster at Stormfront, the largest online white supremacist forum, went a step farther and admonished Limbaugh for refusing to acknowledge the inherent role of race in Francis’s argument.

“Now if only El Rushbo will also acknowledge, that what’s at the heart of this Nationalist & Populist movement is Racialism,” he wrote. “Come on Limbaugh. Grow a real set of nuts would ya [sic].”

In “From Household to Nation,” Francis reflected on a conversation he once had with Pat Buchanan at a fundraising event in which Francis told Buchanan that,

he would be better off without all the hangers-on, direct-mail artists, fund-raising whiz kids, marketing and PR czars, and the rest of the crew that today constitutes the backbone of all that remains of the famous ‘Conservative Movement’ and who never fail to show up on the campaign doorstep to guzzle someone else's liquor and pocket other people's money. … Go to New Hampshire and call yourself a patriot, a nationalist, an America Firster, but don't even use the word ‘conservative.' It doesn't mean anything any more.”

Admittedly, it rings of Trump. However, for all his supposed prescience about the merits of identifying as a conservative, it is important to remember that at his core, Francis was a racist who said such things as:

If whites wanted to do so, they could dictate a solution to the racial problem tomorrow — by curtailing immigration and sealing the border, by imposing adequate fertility controls on nonwhites and encouraging a higher white birth rate, by refusing to be bullied into enduring ‘multiculturalism,’ affirmative action, civil rights laws and policies; and by refusing to submit to cultural dissolution, inter-racial violence and insults, and the guilt that multiracialists inculcate.

Look no further than the voices that are celebrating Limbaugh for citing the ideas of a white nationalist as a “historic turning point,” to see who are most excited by the rise of Trump. Make no mistake, however. It’s not Trump himself they’re celebrating, but the space he has created in the mainstream for their extreme views.